Onfido, the global automated identity verification provider, today announced the findings of its 2024 Identity Fraud Report and unveiled its Fraud Lab.
The report points to the increasing availability of simple-to-use AI tools “as the reason for a 31X increase in deepfakes1 and 5X increase in digitally forged identities, making it easier for criminals to carry out sophisticated attacks. Onfido’s Fraud Lab has been launched as a response to these trends.”
With the ability to mass-produce synthetic attacks, it “delivers faster, more accurate AI-powered fraud protection to its customers through its Real Identity Platform, saving them over $3.9B in losses.”
The fifth annual Identity Fraud Report “highlights the increasing role of AI in perpetrating fraud, as fraudsters turn to online tools and generative AI, such as deepfake apps. Businesses are countering deepfakes by leveraging biometric verification powered by deep learning to detect the presence of a real person, which remains an effective deterrent, creating an AI vs AI showdown.”
This year, ‘easy’ or less sophisticated fraud also “continued to rise, up 7.4% from 2022 and accounting for 80.3% of all attacks.”
This indicates a persistent trend of quantity “over quality, as fraudsters look for minimum effort and maximum reward by launching multiple attacks simultaneously — enabled by broadening access to automated AI-powered tools.”
Simon Horswell, Senior Fraud Specialist at Onfido, said:
“The confluence of cheap, genuine identity documents appearing on the Dark Web, combined with simpler and free generative AI tools, has created a gangster’s paradise. Creating large-scale, convincing attacks at the click of a button has never been easier for malicious actors, who increasingly use AI to attack en masse. It’s become an AI vs AI battleground, where only defensive AI that’s trained on the latest attack vectors at scale can keep up with the evolving threat landscape.”
In the space of just six months, Onfido’s Fraud Lab has “helped improve its fraud detection rates on documents by 5X and on biometrics by 9X. Its team of experts, including former police and border agents, collect and label data while measuring fraud detection performance against multiple attack vectors on both document and biometric verification solutions.”
Training AI models to achieve optimal performance is “challenging when only a few new attack incidents are available, so the team dissects the one or two samples they uncover, labelling their key signals.”
The lab’s unique forensic environment then “allows the experts to recreate synthetic derivatives, such as 3D documents or deepfakes in sufficient numbers to generate viable datasets for both training and evaluation.”
The lab also provides the ability to analyze “the anatomy of global fraud rings, enabling Onfido to detect and stop over 267 to date.”
Digital forgeries and video fraud are developing, fast
As the increasing availability of AI tools “makes digitally manipulated images even quicker and cheaper to produce, the Identity Fraud Report finds that digital document forgeries jumped 18% in 2023 — with roughly 5X more digital forgeries than observed in 2020, while physical counterfeits declined 17%.”